The songs come from a vulnerable place, but expressing that part of yourself can also make you feel fearless.

I've been in LA for 5 years now, and it's been very freeing creatively.

I wanted this album to sound like a big crocheted blanket - to be warm yet to have a lot of space.

My relationship with Music Row has always been, from my end, optimistic and hopeful that there is more than one way to approach the writing, recording, and marketing of an album.

Once you get away from where you're from, you look at it in a different way.

I'm a big fan of '70s records where artists could draw on whatever influences they wanted.

I was in relationship with a guy who was much older than me - either he was past his prime and I was coming into mine. There was nothing I could do to keep his attention.

My father, Fred Carter, Jr., is definitely an extraordinaire.

There's a lot of freedom for me living in L.A.

The songs come from a vulnerable place, but expressing that part of yourself can also make you feel fearless.

No matter what you do for a living all we have is music to get through certain situations.

Any album that I ever put out I'm going to send it to country radio first.

Yes, we do mimic our parents in a lot of ways.

I toured in Europe first, before I did any touring in the U.S. It was with Jimmy Nail and others.

I never excluded any genre on my first record.

I'm sure every song has some kind of undertone of what I was going through with Chris. It was my life.

Nashville has a formula, and it works a lot of the time, but it wasn't right for me. They're afraid to step outside the box - even though, with me, my success came because I was outside of the box to begin with.

I think the themes in my songs are very similar from the first album to the newest one. It's all about the human condition and how we are all trying to learn to live with each other and survive love and life.

But once you become successful, everyone has an idea of what you should do.

It's my sick fantasy to be a Cosmo cover.

I never listened to country music growing up.

Our live show is a definite experience, since it's an extension of my albums.

Once you get away from where youre from you look at it in a different way.

I love Nashville, and I love the South, but on a professional level, I had started feeling smothered by the Nashville way of doing things.

I started recording because I was always complaining about the records that I was getting of my songs. At least if I did them and messed them up, I wouldn't have anyone else to blame.

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.

All my songs were solo voices. Just me singing. In fact, that was the gimmick - no gimmick. Just singing straight with not too much background.

It's part of the calling to at least do a few songs in the show that give people some hope. There's so much hurt in this world and... music is such a great healing balm and a great way to forget your troubles.

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

When I heard his first songs, Dylan was answering certain questions that I had all my life been asking myself.

The bands that wrote the big, heroic rock songs - I really wanted to make a record like that.

Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.

This is an album of songs that I've always loved, tunes that I heard. For the first time in 53 years of recording, I really had control over an entire album, start to finish.

All my songs are where I am.

That's what I like to do, I like to make songs.

We would turn everything into songs in those days.

Sometimes, but the year I lived in France I started to write songs.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

I had deeper, more reflective songs on the first album.

I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.

The process depends on the situation, and I don't think there are any two songs that have gone exactly the same way... well, actually, that's not true.

I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.

We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.